Look at me.
And that brought me back to the fact that I had every reason to believe that what the Rabid had done to Chase was what he’d had planned for me, when I was a kid. On some level, I’d always known it wasn’t a random attack and that the monster had come looking for me. That my parents had just been the ones standing in his way.
Come out, come out, wherever you are. …
But why me? Why any of us?
I brought my eyes to Chase’s and in them, I saw myself. Saw that from the moment I’d first heard his tortured howl, my gut had been telling me that we were the same. I looked at him, and I saw the red haze of his dreams and of mine. Remembered the fight-or-flight instinct, a wild, feral, merciless, uncompromising need to survive that I’d felt in his mind and in my own.
The alphas had asked Chase how he was attacked. They’d wanted to know, because they’d wondered if it would tell them something more than any previous investigations had. The Rabid had been hunting for more than a decade. During that time, at least some of the alphas must have known.
They must have watched him and wondered how he made the impossible flicker to life.
I wasn’t aware of the moment that my thoughts went from silent to verbal, but the others had no problem picking up on the things that had gone unspoken, their minds and their thoughts interwoven with mine. “Maybe the Rabid does something a little different each time,” I said, a hot feeling, like steam, seeping over my body in a way that wasn’t pleasant in the least. “Lake and I were looking for patterns earlier, but what if there is no pattern, other than the fact that every one of Wilson’s wolves should have died? What if the secret isn’t about the attack at all?”
No magic sequence. No recipe for how to ravage a body just right.
“What if it’s about the victim?”
Chase and I were the same.
We did whatever it took to get out of a situation alive and intact. If you blocked us into a corner, we lost it. If you beat us down, eventually, we popped back up. We fought, and we held on, and at the end of the day, we lived.
I’d grown up in a werewolf pack where everyone was stronger than I was and yet, until that day with Sora, I’d never really gotten hurt. With training, there were times when I could get lucky enough to get a few good blows in on a full-grown Were. When the Big Bad Wolf had come knocking at my parents’ door, I’d known to run and hide. When you broke my ribs, I didn’t stay down for long. When I refused to fight, when I resisted the urge to let everything go red and let my inner fury out, I passed out for three days.
When the stakes were high and you tried to force your dominance on me, I rewired the entire hierarchy of the pack.
It wasn’t natural. It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t human, and when I’d asked Callum about it, he’d told me that my bond with the Stone River Pack hadn’t changed me, that I was exactly what I’d always been.
I was a person who had the potential to survive a full-blown werewolf attack.
I was scrappy as hell.
“Don’t you guys get it?” I said, the words pouring out of my mouth, one after another after another. “Chase and I, we’re the same. We’re not normal. We’re …”
I refused to use the word scrappy out loud and rapidly searched for a suitable replacement.
“We’re resilient. Our brains must just be wired differently than everyone else’s, because we don’t respond to threats the way normal people do. Something happens to us, and we fight. Or flight—fly, whatever. The point is, when the situation is bad, when things are really dicey, Chase and I pull through. And so did the kids in Wilson’s cabin. They got bit, and they survived.”
I couldn’t explain how exactly the answer had come to me, or why I believed it so strongly when there were probably other solutions to be found. But I did believe it, and because I did, the three of them did, too.
“It’s not about how you attack them,” Lake said, lifting the thought from my mind. “It’s about who you attack. It makes sense—if only one in ten thousand people has the ability to survive, and you attack randomly, then only one in ten thousand major attacks will lead to a Change.”
“And since Were attacks on human aren’t common …”
“It never happens.”
I felt Chase again, felt his wolf stirring under the surface of his skin, but this time, he pushed the instinct down on his own, replacing it with icy fury.
“If you know who to attack,” he said softly, “if you can figure out what allows someone to survive and selectively attack those people …”
Hunt down those people like animals. Like prey. I brought one hand to the side of Chase’s face, needing to touch him, needing him to know that I understood.
“If you know who to attack,” I said, finishing his thought, feeling for a moment like we were the only two people in the room, “then making new werewolves really isn’t that hard.”
I wondered how the Rabid was finding them, the people like us. I didn’t have to wonder what alphas like Shay would do if they found out how to track our kind, too.
That couldn’t happen.
The Rabid had to die, and the secret had to die with him. Then, and only then, would things go back to normal. Weres would stop attacking humans, because the humans they attacked wouldn’t survive, and the risk of exposure wasn’t worth it for one new werewolf every couple of hundred years.
The Rabid had to die. It was a variation of the same single-minded thought that had driven me for months.
“We need a plan.” For someone who’d once made a practice of rushing into things blind, I was beginning to feel like a broken record with those four little words. Unfortunately, this time, I didn’t have a plan, so I was forced to take the situation apart, piece by piece.
Goal: kill the Rabid.
Problem: a sneak attack at the cabin was out, because our target had at least a dozen not-so-human shields. If we fought Wilson at the cabin, we’d have to fight his little homemade pack, too.
Problem: we couldn’t fight the kids. Not Madison. Not the others. Not when they were victims in all of this, too.
“We’ll either have to catch the Rabid when he leaves the cabin, or we’ll have to lure the kids away from him.” Those were the only two options I could see, and I wasn’t fond of either of them.
“Problem,” Lake said out loud. “If we lure the kids away to attack the Rabid, we’ll have to split up.”
Needless to say, after the last time, none of them were fond of that idea.
“Problem.” Chase ran one hand up his arm as he spoke. I doubted he even noticed he was doing it. “We can’t just wait for Prancer to leave his house. We don’t have time.”
I looked down at my watch, as if there was even the slightest chance that it would tell me how long we had before Ali and Mitch figured out where Lake and I had gone, or how long it would take Callum to respond to the psychic beacon that had gone up the second I’d rewired Devon’s and Lake’s bonds. For that matter …
“Problem,” I said. “If the Senate is making the Rabid a deal, they’ll probably come here to do it in person.” That was the way it was with werewolf bargains. Like my permissions, the alphas’ deal with the devil would require a certain amount of ceremony.
“Okay, so we can’t just wait it out and hope the Rabid leaves his cabin sometime soon, and we can’t risk splitting up to lead his harem on a merry little chase. …”
The fact that Lake had referred to the wolves as a “harem” did not escape my attention, but I wasn’t about to touch that issue—or the vibes I was getting from the bond between us—with a twenty-foot pole.
“We’ll have to lure him out,” I said instead. Chase leaned toward me, the way a plant turns toward the sun. “If we can’t go to him, we’ll have to bring him to us.”
Now.
“Hmmmmm,” Devon said. “If I was a psychotic werewolf who had a fetish for turning small, defenseless children into my own personal lapdogs, what would it take to get me to leave my happy little family to come into town?”
In the back of my mind, an answer began to surface, but before I could verbalize my half-formed plan, Lake and Devon both started to glare at me.